


a million light voices

by mickleborger



Category: Trollhunters (Cartoon)
Genre: Gen, POV Third Person, listen as we know i am garbage for a very particular trope and angor rot is that trope
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-01
Updated: 2018-01-01
Packaged: 2019-02-26 07:57:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 694
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13231398
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mickleborger/pseuds/mickleborger
Summary: arrives to fandom one year late with coffee and strong feelings about the undead troll assassin and the things that are eating him





	a million light voices

**Author's Note:**

> (Diablo Swing Orchestra, "Ode To The Innocent")

i.

He stumbles on his way to the boat, limbs flailing in the panic of being able to do nothing, water splashing in a way that reminds him of hunger against his leg.  The night has never before felt so bright, and the laughter carries so far across the lake it must have claimed the space left empty between his ears.

The moon hangs in the sky like a great empty pit and the paths snake all over each other before him, overgrown.  He has forgotten the way back.

ii.

It’s the second that’s the hardest, with the hideous roar of horror from the first taking up all the space in his heart, the stolen soul sticking to his tongue with the grit of all the food he cannot taste.  The second is hardest, still looking at him as if he were kin, still taking the time to ask him what he is.  Do they hear the screaming from inside his chest?

The third does not ask.  The third is easier.

iii.

There are many things howling inside of him now and none of them is him, who is lost far beyond himself, whom he can no longer hear over the unending clamor of his ghosts.  He has learned and forgotten their names a thousand times over, gnawing on them as he gnaws on his tongue, weaving them into the shadows he casts, giggling to himself with a voice that is no longer his.

 _Darkness is the absence of light_ , he thinks, stretching out a hand to swallow yet more of it.  He walks beneath the sun with a proud sort of spite but it does not make him feel whole.

iv.

He breaks off parts of his worthless flesh and makes monsters out of them, breathes his will and his rage into thoughtless agents of malice.  He fragments himself into little cursed dolls made of a stone that crumbles like clay clumps dug out of the sand and brought unexpectedly into the sunlight.

In the beginning he had carved his own likeness into their puny faces, laughing darkly.  He stopped the first time he saw a broken one, its face intact, leering back up at him.

v.

Where is he, underneath all this lifeless stone?  Nowhere, everywhere, elsewhere; he himself has been lifeless stone for so long he cannot tell the difference.  He lets the chains rust around his wrists and lays his head down, the fireflies in his belly fluttering in desperation.  There are living things outside, crowing and chirping and crawling all over each other, staying far away from the temple where he finds the closest thing to rest he has had since a terrible whisper in the darkness anointed him  _champion_.

Only the green growing things come near in this place, carefree trees and riotous weeds and daring vines and moss that has never known fear.  He lets himself be covered, lets the moss grow and the vines climb, lets the things that live without will or grief or rage hide the thing filled with nothing but will and all else but life.

 _A grave, a grave_ , he laughs in silence, _for the thing that cannot die_.

vi.

 _Champion, champion_ , he almost hears through his helm of greenery long since turned black, unliving and yet clinging on just as he.  _Champion, champion_ , he does not hear through the haze that surrounds him, his flesh in so many pieces on the ground, nothing of him left but a rabid scream and the breathless horde he raises.

 _Champion, champion_ , something hisses even though the noise he makes.  He thinks the scream he answers with is the loudest of all, but who can tell?

vii.

There is nothing green in this place below the earth, and like him his crown of green things has crumbled -- unliving thing that finally comes to death, never really clinging just as he, in the end.  No vines will come to crack his stone, no moss to cover his flesh, no flowers to veil his corpse.

 _A grave, a grave_ , a voice laughs as if from far across a starlit lake, _for the thing that will never die_.


End file.
